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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Monthly Archives: February 2016

McMillan’s Codex #26: Bioshock Infinite

17 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in McMillan's Codex

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Bioshock Infinite

McMillan’s Codex 26 By C.T. McMillan

Bioshock Infinite

Audiences seem split between having better story over gameplay, or vice versa. Some do not like Metal Gear Solid for being all story and some do not like Call of Duty for being all gameplay. In the case of Bioshock Infinite, there is only one way you can go.

Bioshock Infinite 1

The combat of Infinite is an arduous hurdle. It is clear not much thought went into its development during the game’s creation. Irrational Games has a history of making good shooters with director Ken Levine responsible for System Shock 2 and the first Bioshock. Such a legacy was lost as Infinite is probably the worst shooter I have ever played.

Clunky and stiff. Levels often devolve into shooting galleries as enemies pour in and swarm you. Usually a whole complement of ammunition is necessary to put down just one enemy if you can stay on target as he moves like a meth-head dodging cars on a highway. There is an obvious effort to make the combat fast-paced, but the process of moving and shooting is slow and staggered. You take your time to focus on an enemy and ten others will mob you. Thankfully, when you die you start right where you left off, but you die often, and make frustratingly little progress.

A few details make combat tolerable. You have the option to use the Vigor system, powers that give you all manner of abilities. Some include Possession that lets you control of enemies, Devil’s Kiss where you can throw explosives, and Murder of Crows that summons a mass of birds. Throughout each level is a Sky-Line, a track that you can ride to reach higher vantage points or get out of firefights. You can shoot as you move, but with the stiff controls doing so is an inconvenient challenge.

Besides gameplay, Infinite succeeds in everything else. The game takes place on Columbia, an airborne city populated by religious fanatics who worship the Founding Fathers. It is a militant Christian utopia that perpetuates the Woodrow Wilson Era of racial purity. European immigrants and colored persons are segregated to industrial jobs in the slums and treated less than human compared to American whites. There is even a cult that worships John Wilkes Booth and a museum lionizing the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Bioshock Infinite 2

Columbia itself is a marvel to behold. Using a steam-punk aesthetic, the world is brought to vivid life in every anachronistic detail. The balloons that keep buildings afloat are made of colorful red, white, and blue canvass. Structures are a mix of Victorian and Antebellum with bright red brick and shiny white. Streets are cobbled and there is always a statue of a Founding Father or an American flag fluttering in the wind. Clothing is consistent with the early 20th century and weapons are given a steam-punk twist with moving parts and obsolete technology.

One of the best parts of Infinite is your companion Elizabeth, a seemingly ordinary young woman with the ability to manipulate tears in reality. Where many games fail at fun companion characters, the responsibility of looking after her is nonexistent. You can play the whole game and not worry about keeping her alive. She will also help you get ammo and bring you back to life when you die. What makes her so interesting is how her personality and growth is on display. She will interact with world on her own, throw out comments every now and then, and lean against walls at rest points. Almost everything she says is unique and full of heart, breaking the tension between intense firefights. It is mesmerizing to behold thanks to fantastic animation and voice work by actress Courtnee Draper.

The damsel in distress is a story used often in videogames. That is what Infinite appears to be, but it goes places games have never gone before. The game is a spiritual successor to the original Bioshock, the story of an underwater objectivist utopia. The worlds of Bioshock and Infinite are very similar and the latter makes that point all the more obvious upon revelation of its main themes of hypertime and parallel dimension theory.

Hypertime is the concept that every decision you make creates branching timelines that exist in their own universes. Throughout the game are clues that allude to the possibility that the player, Booker DeWhitt, has been to Columbia before and is intimately involved in its being. The biggest tell are encounters with the Lutece twins, an omniscient brother sister pair that seem to be everywhere, constantly mentioning how they anticipate alternate outcomes.

Propaganda posters referring to a False Shepard show a claw marked with the letters “AD,” a sign branded on your own hand. Elizabeth has the power to open tears to other dimensions to bring things through. She can also travel and make changes to the present to a limited capacity. When everything reaches a climax, the story is challenging, but the game does thoroughly explain what is going on. Pay attention, and accept what is said.

Bioshock Infinite 3

Like XCOM, Bioshock Infinite is a challenging and frustrating experience. The terrible combat would mean its demise if the story and world were not exceptional in every way. If you can get through the stiff and clunky shooting mechanics, the revelations and interactions with Elizabeth make this colorful game worth the struggle.

_______

CT McMillan 1

C.T. McMillan (Episode 169) is a film critic and devout gamer.  He has a Bachelors for Creative Writing in Entertainment from Full Sail University.

On Top of It #16: Letting Go of Holden

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in On Top of It

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Holden Caufield, J.D. Salinger, Lisa Martens, The Catcher in the Rye

On Top of It #16 by Lisa Martens

Letting Go of Holden

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they’re pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’s be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. – Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye

I first picked up this book because it had a fiery cover and was worth 30 Accelerated Reader points. I was in fifth grade, and our school library had a point system called Accelerated Reader…the harder the book, the more points you received. At the end of the year, you used your AR points to buy things—like more books.

My strategy was always to read books higher than my grade level since they were worth more points. I wouldn’t even look at a book unless it had the pink mark of the eighth-grade level. Some kids took the opposite approach – they’d read tons of children’s books (green level or lower), and slowly accumulate points that way. But, unlike them, I actually enjoyed reading.

The Catcher in the Rye made very little sense to me, but Holden’s blase attitude, rambling sentences and disregard for things like grades appealed to the blossoming adolescent in me. He was my first taste of ‘bad boy.’ Within the first two pages, Holden had been kicked out of a private school and he didn’t seem to care. It wasn’t even the first school he’d been kicked out of.

The Catcher in the Rye

I didn’t understand what the word fuck meant, but Holden was already tired of it. He fascinated me. I read the book and earned the points without knowing that Holden was on every Honors English high school required reading list. I aspired to meet a man like Holden, only with a machete, because I also had a thing for my Costa Rican gardener.

When I finally reached an age where I could appreciate everything Holden was saying, I was a teenager in Plano, Texas. I no longer clamored after useless reader points. I went to a school without windows and teachers called us by our ID number, not by our names. Although I wasn’t into selling drugs or piercing anyone’s tongue in the bathroom with a bobby pin, I had a bit of rebellious nerd in me. My friends and I broke into the aquaculture lab to eat lunch and play poker by the fish tanks. We were a strange crowd but somehow we got along: a Mormon girl named Heather who picked locks but wouldn’t drink caffeine or kiss a boy, a chubby Asian named Theresa who had a threesome in a hottub with a guy she’d met online (she loved his blog), and a gothic storyteller who’d gotten in trouble for writing a fake suicide note. Julie made her fingernails pointy and had to see a school counselor about that note, which included a scene where she was raped by aliens. We stole things, skipped school, and Julie and I pretended not to know English to be put into easier classes. I declared Holden my literary boyfriend. Then one day, as we ate Cheetos under the stairs and our fat folded over our jeans in the dark, Theresa scrunched her nose up and said, “Holden’s a pussy. He couldn’t even fuck a prostitute.”

I soon reread the passage with fresh eyes. It was true. Holden wasn’t a golden god. He was a snotty, sheltered, hypocritical virgin. He would never be able to provide me with the outrageous sex that Theresa talked about. He wouldn’t pressure me into a threesome or anal or write poems about my fat on his blog. When shit got real, he cried in a corner. He flunked out of school. All he did was judge other people for liking things and doing things.

I’d lost my boy idol. Someday, and someday soon, I’d want someone who wasn’t afraid to be sexy. And, after that, what would I like next…a man? Who had ambitions and paid bills? The kind of person who (gulp) did things that contributed to society?

More importantly, how had I been captivated by this coward for so long? Holden hadn’t changed – nothing he said or did changed. Everything he has ever done or will ever do is frozen, immutable, complete, like the museum of his childhood. He was and still is perfectly constant.

And down a secluded street, shaded by benevolent oaks, at the end of a silent cul de sac in one of the more nondescript suburban corners of heaven, is a house with a high wooden fence. And behind that fence, by the pool, J. D. Salinger is placing a little white pill onto the outstretched tongue of a teenage girl, who, wings aflutter, is still trying to reach Holden Caufield.

_______

NOTE: This essay originally appeared on Episode 22.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #17: Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000)

14 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

#17: Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000)

Loves Labours Lost poster 2

Oh fuck.

Fuck.

I mean: shit.

Don’t see this movie.

Don’t see this movie unless you are totally high.

Okay, let’s consider what Branagh tried to do with Love’s Labour’s Lost. This adaptation presented the Shakespeare comedy as a Hollywood musical from the late 1930s, in which Shakespeare’s language is interrupted by songs from the great American songbook (Gershwin, Porter, Kern, et cetera) and dancing appropriate to a bygone age. I don’t really object to the idea, as I love all of these things, and after all, this is a comedy.

But. I mean. Really.

Loves Labours Lost 3

Part of the problem is that the film oozes not with nostalgia, but with especially fake nostalgia for a time none of these primary actors actually experienced. Part of what made Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly amazing is that they weren’t being nostalgic–they were modern for their own time. Gershwin was modern. Cole Porter was modern. If you are going to go retro, you need to inhabit the past as if it were modern, too. Branagh does this as an actor. Branagh fails to persuade anyone else to do this as a director.

The plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost is chiefly about four men who swear an oath to devote themselves to three years of a spartan, celibate, academic life.

Loves Labours Lost 2

Part of the problem is that so many of the principle actors, well, suck. Matthew Lillard, who you may remember as Shaggy from the live action Scooby Doo movies, or as the sad assistant in 13 Ghosts, plays Longaville. Alessando Nivola, surely hired for how cool his name is, plays King Ferdinand of Navarre, not that you can tell from his performance. Adrian Lester blandly plays Dumaine. Contrasted with Branagh, they seem like malfunctioning animatronics, except when they can distract us with their barely-adequate choreographed dancing.

Part of the problem is that some of the actors REALLY suck.

Loves Labours Lost 6Alicia Silverstone portrays … the princess of France? She has a twinkle in her eye some naïve actors get (like Claire Danes) when they grab the opportunity to try Shakespeare. Look at how awesome I am, she seems to be implying, while being abysmally, quite shittingly, bad. This is the sort of acting one sees in sitcoms for children. She makes faces as articulate as the puppets from a Sid and Marty Krofft show

Richard Clifford, as the servant Boyard, is compelling, as is Richard Briers as the curate Sir Nathaniel. They aren’t onscreen long.

About the time you consider swallowing bleach, twenty-five minutes in, an even goofier subplot interrupts the story.

Loves Labours Lost 7Timothy Spall (who played Wormtail in the Harry Potter films) is actually quite good as Don Armado, whose accent strains comprehension.  (Shakespeare found foreign accents inexplicably funny.)

Loves Labours Lost 9Nathan Lane plays Costard, the clown, and musters the sort of low energy vaudeville that Billy Crystal brought to the gravedigger in Hamlet. It succeeds neither as lively vaudeville (again, when vaudeville was great it was modern), nor as Shakespearean tomfoolery.

And then, mother of shit, squeaky-voiced Alicia Silverstone fucking sings.

Loves Labours Lost 10This is the nadir of Branagh’s casting. The spread-out good performances drown in a sea of mealy-mouthed ham acting. Few of these actors are in the same movie, and those who are aren’t in a good one. In so eagerly chasing down Hollywood with Shakespeare, Branagh forgot to make it good.

_______

1flipJohn King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Episode 192: Erotic Poetry Night IV

12 Friday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Erotic Literature, Poetry

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Episode 192 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Erotic Poetry Night IV

This week features our 4th annual Erotic Poetry Night, featuring Jesse Bradley, Teege Braune, Stephanie Rizzo, Danielle Kessinger, Amy Watkins, David James Poissant, Ashley Inguanta, Sarah Viren, and (ahem) John King.

Amy_7
Erotic Poetry Night 4 Ashley Inguanta
Erotic Poetry Night 4 Sarah Viren
Erotic Poetry Night 4 John
Erotic Poetry Night 4 David James Poissant
Erotic Poetry Night 4 Stephanie Rizzo
Erotic Poetry Night 4 Jesse
Erotic Poetry Night 4 Danielle
Erotic Poetry Night 4 Teege Braune

NOTES

Litlando-Poster

Get tickets for Litlando here.


Episode 192 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

21st Century Brontë #9: The Dance Macabre

11 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in 21st Century Bronte

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Aristotle, Michael Stevens, Nostalgia-Phantom, Undertale, Yu Yu Hakusho

21st Century Brontë #9 by Brontë Bettencourt

The Dance Macabre

Last fall, I couldn’t step into the University of Central Florida’s Anime club without stumbling into an Undertale conversation. This unassuming 16-bit indie game (8-bit in combat) took the gaming community by storm in under a month, earning numerous awards proclaiming it the best game of 2015 when barely any of the year was left. I was more than ready to gush over the characters’ endearing quirks and emotional plot twists.

Undertale 2

My friends had another topic in mind. I was shown an online fanmade comic drawn by the lovely Nostalgia-Phantom that involves one of the game’s beloved characters interacting with the story’s antagonist. This could only end horribly.

After I managed to stop gnashing my teeth, I noticed the odd amount of glee from my anime club friends. This comic was brought out in the open among friends, who took in such images of betrayal, helplessness, fragility, and morbidity, and recapped them with smiles on their faces. Reveling and revulsion coalesced.

Do we, as humans have some affinity for experiencing experiencing the macabre?

In fifth grade, my best friend and I were obsessed with Yu Yu Hakusho. I remember illegally selling candy just to buy the DVDs, $30 a pop, and had only had three twenty something minute episodes (four if the distributor was generous).

Team_Gorenja

There’s one battle toward the end of the Dark Tournament arc, where my favorite character faced off against a demon who could conjure bombs. The character survived by the skin of his teeth, sopping wet from his own blood, flesh littered with shrapnel wounds. The agonizing screams are still vivid in my mind.

The gruesomeness was why it stuck with me for so long. I could exactingly describe the gore of the battle, the shoddy bits of animation, and the pitches of the dialogue delivery. I did not know why I gravitated toward the depiction of suffering.

On a surface level, a story cannot exist without opposing forces butting heads. But at a base level, we require discomfort great enough to drive the opposing forces to decisive action. But the greater we can feel the anguish, the more in tune we are with the character.

I’ve been told that a healthy amount of suffering is cathartic in a story because it is not ultimately happening to us. (Thanks, Aristotle.) By it happening vicariously, we then reflect on our own lives with appreciation. But full on suffering triggers a little more than an appreciative prayer.

Perhaps we can empathize more with physical pain. Psychological pain, such as death of a loved one, or mental illness, or divorce caters to a more tapered audience. I haven’t been married yet (to my knowledge), and although death is imminent for all living beings, I haven’t had anyone close to me pass away. Those who have experienced this will comprehend that primal ache associated with the psychological. But physical pain is easier to depict, and the sight of blood creates an immediate, visceral connection to pain.

Luke

I feel phantom aches depending on what is being damaged before me. The thought of a solid bone cracking. Seeing a character that we’ve developed an emotional attachment to suffer is–

And these characters are fictional.

With adrenaline compelling us to act, we’re instead left to our imagination of what the character is undergoing. There is a mutual helplessness felt by both audience and character.

Michael Stevens in the Vsauce video Why Are We Morbidly Curious? states that “we find uncertainty more unpleasant than unpleasant certainty.” This coincides with a method the idea of writing less equals more, allowing the audience’s minds to work against them when faced with gruesome scenarios.

Stevens claims that experiencing the macabre allows our aggression to burn off, allowing us to experience a release of strong or repressed emotions. Maybe there is truth to feeling happy due to suffering, or at least witnessing the suffering of another being. And because this being is fictional, there is little to no guilt involved, just a tangle of other emotions.

unnamed-2

There’s an audio file of Undertale fans voice-acting the mentioned comic above. The better part of me would like to say that I haven’t listened to it.

_______

21st Cen Bronté

Brontë Bettencourt (Episode 34) graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelors in English Creative Writing. When she’s not writing or working, she is a full time Dungeon Master and Youtube connoisseur.

McMillan’s Codex 25: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

10 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in McMillan's Codex

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McMillan’s Codex 25 By CT McMillan

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

In my last entry, I brought up the subject of level design in Dishonored and how it is adapted to accommodate any play style. Loud or quite, there were many avenues of approach one could traverse depending on how they want to play or what direction they want to take the story. Any game that gives you such freedom should be standard practice in the industry, no matter the genre. Videogames are an escapist medium and why restrict players by not giving them as many options as possible? One of the best examples of such depth-full choice is the original Deus Ex from 2000. Though I have not played it, I did play Human Revolution, a prequel and worthy successor according to most. Was it good enough to make me play the original?

DEHR1

Cyberpunk is one of my favorite genres. It is a science fiction fan’s dream come true with advanced technologies integrated into the fabric of society to the point of dystopia. Robots and cyborgs walk among regular people as massive corporations run the world, killing each other to gain the upper hand. Ordinary citizens must resort to crime to survive be it with conventional weapons or cybernetics. Communication has reached new heights as one can access another’s mind through neurological enhancements, opening up the possibility for total control by those with malicious intent.

While Ghost in the Shell, Shadowrun, and Blade Runner are classic cyberpunk, Human Revolution is about a world taking its first steps into embracing technology. Biological augmentation is still a new phenomenon as society gradually takes it in and struggles to adapt. The over-arching conflict of the world is normal people do not see cyborgs as equals and feel augmentation should be banned. It gets to the point of civil revolt as dissidents riot against the corporations responsible for introducing such technology.

While it does not make any sense why people would rebel over a voluntary procedure that you must pay for, it is a good enough excuse for the game to explore themes of human transcendence and corporate control. On the one hand, technology allows us to become more than who we are, but sometimes we forget what we are giving away in exchange and what it means for those providing. People with augmentations have problems with their bodies rejecting implants and depend on drugs supplied by corporations. They are also at the mercy of their enhancement’s creators who can do whatever they want at the flip of a switch. As the character Adam Jenson, a corporate security officer turned cyborg after a terrorist attack, it is up to you to determine if augmentations are truly worth becoming more human than human, or just another puppet.

DEHR2

In gameplay you are able to explore these themes. Like its predecessor, Human Revolution allows you to play however you want with upgradable augmentations. If you like stealth, there are radar enhancements, a vision mode that lets you see through walls, and the ability to activate a cloak. There are also combat enhancements like fast reloads, increased strength for throwing objects, and stronger armor. Whatever the situation there is an augmentation or a weapon to suit your needs. With tranquilizers and tasers you can put down a foe without taking their life or kill them with firearms.

Each level is designed with many options in mind. Waist-high walls can be used to take cover when in a fight or to sneak around patrolling guards. Timing and quick movements win the day if you take the stealth route. There are also plenty of vents and high perches that can take you around enemies and circumvent a lot of potential trouble spots.

Peppered throughout levels are instances that help you progress for completing. In the first level at a factory taken over by terrorists, you have the option to rescue hostages, one of which is the husband of the woman in charge of the facility. Come the end of the level you confront the terrorist leader holding the wife at gunpoint. If you talk him down and get him to leave peacefully, you will reunite the wife with her husband, and earn an experience bonus.

There are all sorts of side options and methods that can help you out depending on how you approach them. The social element is as important as your augmentations where you can get what you want if you know the right thing to say. On a mission that involves infiltrating a police precinct, you can convince the desk clerk to let you in through the front door without having to sneak in at the risk making a scene. Later you confront an anti-augmentation politician on his hypocrisy and talk someone out of suicide. There is even an augmentation to assist you in making the right choices in dialog.

DEHR3

True freedom is something all videogames should strive for, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution does its best to make you feel in control. With the sequel Mankind Divided on the horizon, I am excited to be entrenched in the world of cyberpunk once more. Until then, I feel obligated to visit the classic that started it all.

_______

CT McMillan 1

C.T. McMillan (Episode 169) is a film critic and devout gamer.  He has a Bachelors for Creative Writing in Entertainment from Full Sail University.

Buzzed Books #37: Application for Release from the Dream

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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Amy Watkins, Application for Release from the Dream, Buzzed Books, Poetry, Tony Hoagland

Buzzed Books #37 by Amy Watkins

Tony Hoagland’s Application for Release from the Dream

Application for Release from the Dream

I enjoyed the second half of Tony Hoagland’s fifth poetry collection, Application for Release from the Dream (Graywolf Press, 2015), so much that I almost felt guilty for how critical I was of the first half.

Many of the poems in the first half of the book have a thematic counterpart in the second half. For example, one of the poems in the first section is “Special Problems in Vocabulary,” a poem about the limitations of language. It begins:

There is no single particular noun
for the way a friendship,
stretched over time, grows thin,
then one day snaps with a popping sound.

Those lines could almost be an early draft of one of the last poems in the book, “There Is No Word”:

…we have reached the end of a pretense
–though to tell the truth,
what I already am thinking

is that language deserves the credit–
how it will stretch just so much and no further;
how there are some holes it will not cover up…

The book contains several of these pairs–two poems about language, two poems about his father, two poems about divorce. I’m not certain whether the later poems are meant to be further reflections on the themes or answers to the earlier poems. I’m not sure if I would respond differently to the early poems upon a second reading, but in all these pairs, I prefer the second poem.

Both halves of the book contain plenty of Hoagland’s signature humor. He gives the business to corporate tools, uptight academics, clueless suburbanites, his father, his ex-wife, and the fool who blasts his radio at 2 in the morning. In the second half of the book, he turns his wit on himself. “Summer Dusk,” for example, is as close to a pastoral as you’re likely to get from Hoagland. It begins, “I put in my goddamn hearing aid / to listen to a bird…” The poems in the second half in particular are funny, a little melancholy, sometimes a little mean, but they work because they “aim up” or, better yet, aim in.

In “The Story of the Mexican Housekeeper,” his father recalls “family friends” who “hired a woman from across the border, // then kept her hostage for seven years.” The poet/speaker is disgusted that his father apparently finds the story amusing, but when the exploited woman appears near the end of the poem, he imagines her anger directed at him, not his father or even her captors: “she’s mad as hell / not at my dad, but me–yelling // that she doesn’t want to be in this poem for one more minute.” Does using the story in the poem make him complicit in her exploitation? The poem doesn’t answer that question, but it is full of a powerful tension worth exploring.

Like much of Hoagland’s work, these poems “balance on the fence / between irony and hope.” It’s a difficult position to maintain gracefully. When he does, the poems are wry, challenging, and emotionally complex.

Pair with: a Princeton, a pre-Prohibition drink of Old Tom gin layered over chilled port. It’s pretty. It’s classy. Its two flavors don’t totally mix.

_______

Amy Watkins

Amy Watkins (Episode 124, 161, 164) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. Her chapbook, Milk & Water, was published in 2014 by Yellow Flag Press.

The Global Barfly’s Companion #23: The Treehouse

08 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Global Barfly's Companion

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The Global Barfly’s Companion #23 by Josh Dull

Bar: The Treehouse

Location:  68 E Pine St, Orlando, FL 32801

Treehouse outside

Located near Magnolia Avenue and Pine Street in Downtown Orlando, The Treehouse is one of the city’s better kept secrets. For curb appeal, a single black chalkboard sits outside a narrow, shadowed stairwell only during operating hours. Or if you happen to walk through the right door in The Attic nightclub, you’ll find yourself in the small, AstroTurf carpeted space, lit by the amber glow of lanterns and string light bulbs. Should you enter by the stairwell, vines and overhanging leaves line your way into the enclosure.

Treehouse stairs

The space is warm and inviting, with polished oak tables, chairs, and bar top, a digital fire blazing on one of the two TV screens behind the bar. The entire space is about the size of your living room.

Seating area

Due an increase in popularity and a decrease in demand for craft cocktails, their drink menu has become more limited, however their infusion shots are still very much present, featuring flavors like apple pie and blueberry.

Morning Wood Prep

If you ask nicely, bartender Dan might even make one of the old craft cocktails Treehouse was once known for, such as the “Morning Wood” which begins with the bartender running a torch across a maple plank and capturing the smoke with the mason jar the drink will be served in, giving the cocktail a naturally smoky flavor. A full liquor bar leaves Dan more than capable of making classics such as the Old Fashioned or Cosmopolitan and a wide variety of beers lines the shelf and cooler, including hard to find brews such as Shiner Bock.

Bar top

Overall, the greatest strength in this establishment is its novelty. With its secluded location and distinct woodland aesthetic, the patron feels they’ve found something rare, exclusive, and dare I say it, magical. The arboreal walk up the stairs is a stark shift from the urban environs outside, as is the abrupt change in scenery should one enter from the Attic. Coming to the Treehouse feels familiar, like you’ve come to a friend’s house to watch a game or just relax with a cold brew. It’s an excellent place to begin a night of barhopping in Downtown Orlando, or an interesting stop in the middle of your festivities. Bring your friends here and they will definitely be impressed.

_______

Joshua DullJosh Dull is a U.S. Air Force veteran and an aspiring fiction author with an emphasis on social issues. He has recently completed his Bachelor’s degree with Honors in the Major from the University of Central Florida. When he isn’t at his computer writing and revising, he enjoys finding new and eclectic venues in the nightlife of whatever city he happens to be in. He currently resides in Orlando, Florida.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #16: As You Like It (2006)

07 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

≈ 3 Comments

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

#16. As You Like It (2006)

Some enthusiastic newbies to Shakespeare crave an authentically Shakespearean experience, something satisfyingly old-looking, true to history, and they will primly turn their nose up at productions that have the gall to change the setting of a play.

This is a truly silly position. Oh, there isn’t anything terribly wrong with having a traditional setting for Shakespeare’s plays, as Olivier’s Richard III proves. But there is an obligation for every new production of Shakespeare to actually be new, not just enact the plays like a theatrical jukebox for eternity.

Also, the idea of the purity of a setting is problematic if we consider that the plays, including the history plays, are historically imaginative or else inaccurate (such as the tolling of the clock in Julius Caesar). There is a theatrical approach to Shakespeare called period practice, which strives to painstakingly recreate a theatrical experience that Shakespeare’s own audience would have witnessed. Such shows forgo modern effects, pyrotechnics, staging, and lighting, yet they don’t take this approach all the way and have the female characters portrayed by men. Such productions imagine the bard in heaven blessing them for not using all of the tools of modern theater to entice an audience to buy a ticket for the show.

What is an appropriate historical setting for Macbeth? The eleventh century, based on Shakespeare’s source material, or the early seventeenth century, when the play was written and performed? Or in an alternate universe where the eleventh and seventeenth centuries overlap? Or Ontario, circa the winter of 1967, perhaps?

Getting too excited that a production looks sufficiently dusty is in absurdly wretched taste.

In his essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884), Henry James wrote, “We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donee: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.”

In the case of a play like As You Like It, the setting isn’t especially all that clear in the first place. A dukedom in France. The forest of Arden. It’s basically another comedy, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that is about flight into a pastoral landscape, in this case caused by Frederick claiming his older brother’s title as duke and then exiling his brother. The court’s loyalties are split in two, with the Duke Senior’s entourage following him in the wild.

As You Like It 1

Kenneth Branagh set his film in late 19th century Japan, in an unnamed treaty port, thus making the presence of Englishmen, well, plausible. Treaty ports were places where the countries that signed such treaties enjoyed extraterritoriality, meaning they were not subject to the laws of that land. Traders brought families and followers with them and created “mini-empires,” according to a caption at the start of the film. This choice of setting allows for a more believable sense of the drama, that jealousy in families could lead to tragic trajectories.

You know the difference between comedy and tragedy, in Shakespearean terms? Comedies end in marriage, tragedies end in a pile of corpses. Hamlet could be a comedy until he ups and stabs Polonius. And the comedies could turn more dark, if a confrontation were to turn fatal, like it did with poor Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.

A caption in Branagh’s film tells us that the traders and their entourages in Japan “tried to embrace this extraordinary culture, its beauties and its dangers.” Now I can’t help but wonder at the colonialist privilege entailed in this setting, which Branagh tries his best to alleviate by representing very few Japanese people, and by lavishing cinematography upon impressive examples of Japanese architecture, costumes, and painting. Yet traders are not necessarily interchangeable with colonial powers, and unlike colonialists, these traders do try embrace Japanese culture, in a mixture of East and West that looks rather opulent and Romantic, yet not altogether fake, either. Branagh isn’t vouching for the political worldview of his characters, just as Francis Ford Coppola was not serving as an apologist for the mafia, I suppose. The politics of this film, the degree of cultural appropriation involved, remain an open question for me.

Patrick Doyle’s arrangement for the song “Under the Greenwood Tree” includes a koto, which sounds awfully strange, or strangely awful, plucked with the melody.

There is something fascinating about Branagh’s casting, though: Branagh does not star in this film, apart from a clever cameo at the film’s close.

There is something else fascinating about his casting: it’s not his pathological pandering-to-Hollywood approach.

As You Like It, Molina and Kline

Oh, Alfred Molina plays the clown Touchstone, and Kevin Kline plays the gloomy Jaques (the original Eeyore). But Kevin Kline has training in Shakespeare, and proved himself in a film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Alfred Molina acquits himself deliciously as a fool, adding a dash of zaniness like Michael Keaton in Much Ado About Nothing. And despite being known as a Hollywood actor, Alfred Molina is, I’ll be damned, actually British.

As You Like It Brian Blessed

Most of the cast is British. Brian Blessed plays the two brothers, both the gentle soul and the angry usurper.

'As You Like It', front: Romola Garai, Brian Blessed, Bryce

Romula Garai, Brian Blessed, and Bryce Dallas Howard.

Bryce Dallas Howard, not terribly famous, sounds reliably British as the play’s main character Rosaline, despite Howard being American. Romula Garai is by turns touching and delightful as Rosaline’s cousin. And Richard Briars brings compelling dignity and nobility to the role of Adam, an old servant who is in search of a world in which loyalty and kindness are rewarded.

As the jumbled nature of the previous two paragraphs reveals, the cast of this film coheres and makes my binary dissection of their performances by country of origin (as is easy in other Branagh films) difficult. These actors are all in the same movie. Branagh has stopped slapping unprepared actors into the bard’s work. And he likely took a more careful hand as a director of his actors by not acting in the film himself. Perhaps someone spoke with him after Love’s Labour’s Lost. Perhaps he had trouble getting funding after that. Perhaps Shakespeare’s ghost visited him in a dream and asked him, “What the fuck?”

As You Like it Klein

As You Like It is a tremendous film, actually, moving and sad and a romp, with actors delivering the music of Shakespeare’s language so naturally, and acting so well together, that it does what great art does: it wakes us up. It makes us more alive. It fills us up with the intelligible world.

_______

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Episode 191: Erin Belieu!

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Carl Phillips, Erin Belieu, Kevin Young, Miami Book Fair International, Poetry, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Slant Six

Episode 191 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I interview poet Erin Belieu,

Erin Belieu

plus I share the Miami Book Fair International reading she participated in with Carl Phillips, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Kevin Young.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Slant SixReconnaissance Carl PhillipsHeaven PoemsBook of Hours

NOTES

  • Check out my first interview with Erin Belieu back on episode 44, when we talked about VIDA and the count.
  • On Superbowl Sunday, February 7, 7 P.M., The Drunken Odyssey will be Super Balling at Writer’s Atelier. More info is here.

Litlando-Poster

Get tickets for Litlando here.


 

Episode 191 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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